Some Thursdays ago I attended a TUCR event featuring Linh Dinh, a poet, short fiction writer, and photographer, who resides in Philadelphia.  I was struck — as often a convincing writer can do — by Dinh’s seeming command of the language of his work, his assuredness as he clambered over the sometimes jarring terrain of his words, which words were in a language not his first.  ”Command,” in fact, may be misleading.  Say instead the speech embodied him, his entire form taking on the stature of his speaking.  Say he was possessed, a shifting sculpture of the sound.  Suffice it to say, a person could tell he spends time reading his own work aloud.

Before him, conversely, read a graduate student, who mumbled his poems as if simply trying to get them out of the way.  I’m sure, of course, there were nerves involved.  We were in a lecture hall, though as such it seemed small, and the seats were well filled with many new eyes, including my friend’s and mine.  And yet, there was a certain discomfort, it seemed, with the words themselves —  strangeness, as in the recognition of an old acquaintance with whom, at one time, one was dear friends — by which roundabout way I mean, he wasn’t quite embracing the work he wrote.

—————————————————

Poets (and I am speaking to all who create), spend some time, perhaps, in the body of your work.  Let it shape the going of your breath.  Listen to the way it sounds as it reverberates about in space.  Feel it.  Let it graze against your lips, your tongue and cheek.  It seems that, to find one’s voice, one must first attempt to speak.

[And what's all this about "finding your voice" in writing anyway.  If it sounds good to you, like a song stuck in your head, then it's yours.  Like lyrics forgotten just until the sounding of the first chord, they'll come back.  You'll put that self skillfully on again.  "One life, one writing!" Robert Lowell proclaims.  Your voice could hardly be anything but just precisely that.]

Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man declares it his life object “to discover the mode of life or art whereby [his] spirit can express itself in unfettered freedom”.  (See also Allen Ginsberg’s project of attaining “unsubstantiated consciousness”.)  In this way there is no difference between your self and the work you create.  Writing then becomes a certain cleaving of the self, the characters you fashion no more than facets of a singular mind, extrapolations of what Yves Klein calls the “raw ground of being”.  Yours.  And, well, that can be frightening.  It takes more than professionalism to maintain that conviction to dive repeatedly into that dark well of one’s own life, the awful groping sometimes, not quite knowing what you’ll find.  In his poem “Of Modern Poetry,” Wallace Stevens describes art as being “the poem of the act of the mind finding what suffices,” which seems as successful a summing-up of the creative process as any.  Often the writing (or sculpting or painting or rock climbing or the building of any such house of cards) itself is the working through of problems, their recognition and their reconciliation one.  Of course there is the initial idea, some shadow of structure, but the path to get there, the building of it, tends to be the surprise.  The puzzle without a picture on the box.

I have found talking with others about the things I am writing to be a precarious situation.  While insight is appreciated, there is always the potential that much of the work itself ends up performed in conversation with others, as opposed to being a product of a mind conversing with itself, with the blank page, with silence.  It’s true.  It’s lonely.  Not, perhaps, a life-path for the social butterfly.   And yet there is an undeniable difference between the writing — “act of the mind finding what suffices” — and the performance of that act, which is the social part of writing.  And then the question is, how do you present yourself so nakedly before others, strangers, possibly judging eyes?

——————————————————————————-

Having moved to Philadelphia in September, in an economic climate such as this, my housemates and I have been searching for jobs for some time.  One of the more hideous things about the internet is its ability to make you even less human to your faceless potential employer.  Hardly anywhere can you apply in person anymore.  Instead, you are Zach Bushnell (and what can a name possibly say?), competent with Excel, Word, Spreadsheets, Powerpoint displays.  You are your college and your age.  So, if you do magically get that call back from that reception gig, or the tobacco study, or the cafe, people will inevitably tell you to “put your best foot forward”.  This means put on a suit, or at least a tie.  Brush your hair.  Wear pants with a clear crease.  Maybe even practice the interview in a mirror, or with a friend.  And so you put on that costume, the one from the back of the closet.  You know that get-up:  ”Responsible Me”.  You walk in, you shake hands.  You perform the scene entitled, “Yourself at a Job Interview”.  You stand up, shake again, walk out past however many hopefuls follow sneering with their eyes.  All scripted.  All here.  KISS Guide to Performing Your Life.

The reading of work, then, is the performance of yourself at the time of its writing, whatever mood, or character, or preposterous costume you were in.  You become your older self again.  This, like any sort of acting, takes practice.  Reading aloud might also act as a sort of conscience test.  How would your words sound were they said?